Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001

This book holds an interesting collation of a number of people’s lectures on sound, from different geographic locations: usually sound in film, although in Tom Paulin’s chapter, ‘The Despotism of the Eye’, he goes more open than this, focussing on how neglected acoustic imagery is in poetry.

There are chapters from Mike Figgis (the director of Leaving Las Vegas), David Lynch, Laura Mulvey, (a professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College London) and Michel Chion (a french composer and theorist), amongst others.

The main, though not the only quality of the book is the level of depth the various contributors go into: for example in Mike Figgis’ engaging account of his work in post production, he recounts a story where the sound from the scene was contaminated by the whooshing sound of the camera magazine: he wanted to use the live sound from the scene rather than overdub, and eventually found the only way to sort the whole thing out was to find out the frequency of the intrusive noise and then compose the scene music in key with that.
Michel Chions’ chapter in the evolution of sound in film, and Laura Mulveys’ chapter on the sociology of film, focussing particularly on the context of the emergence of ‘talkies’, are similarly engaging; as is the interview with David Lynch:

“Sound is 50 per cent of a film, at least. In some scenes it’s almost 100 per cent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film. It’s a thing that can add all the mood and create a larger world. It sets the tone and it moves things. Sound is a great ‘pull’ into a different world. And it has to work with the picture – but without it you’ve lost half the film.”

The book can be read in itself or as an excellent introduction – I am following it with Mike Figgis’s ‘Projections 10’, a series of transcribed interviews with directors, actors, writers, agents.

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